Highlights, lowlights, no lights

Obviously there’s nothing the Prince enjoys more than a spirited pre-election debate and meeting of minds (no kicking). Except perhaps a preliminary bout of mud-wrestling apropos the main event.

This week, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally and her likely successor Barry O’Farrell (42 sleeps till B-Day) gave it their best shot with a bunfight over the date for their televised face-off on the ABC’s Stateline program.

KK was keen to match wits with the Opposition Leader on Friday night, emboldened by a bottom-of-the-O’Barrell performance by the BOF at a western Sydney “people’s forum" on Monday.

Perhaps it was as well for Barry that the fray, at Penrith’s Dame Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, was a curiously ill-publicised affair.

Barry insisted on a talkback radio “debate" on Wednesday that a cocky, post-Penrith Keneally – who was challenging him to “toughen up, front up and debate me" – was telling porkies about his reluctance to front the ABC’s studios on Friday . . . until 2GB’s Ben Fordham got the host,
Quentin Dempster
, on the line.

“Barry didn’t want to do it that early," Dempster said.

Barry was happy to explain why he couldn’t do Friday. If only he had his diary.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

The Premier was “gobsmacked" by O’Farrell’s claim that she was “telling lies", but she did manage her own gobsmacking manoeuvre on Thursday.

Refusing to appear at the last day of a parliamentary inquiry into the state’s $5.3 billion electricity sale, she enlisted Labor MP Luke Foley to act as government carrier pigeon, delivering a mid-morning press release that had the room reeling.

After weeks of ignoring the pleas of a Hunter Valley-based smelter for an explanation as to why the government blocked its electricity supply contract with Delta Electricity weeks before the midnight power sale, Keneally offered to “do everything within [her] power" to make state-owned Macquarie Generation – part of the abandoned second tranche of the privatisation process – sign up instead.

They told the inquiry Hydro had a legal contract with Delta and could sue the government for “several hundred million dollars".

It was left to the Minister for Western Sydney,
David Borger
, to lift the tone on Friday with an indignant press conference to castigate that dreadful southerner
Eddie McGuire
for dismissing western Sydney as “the land of the felafel".

His press release, repeatedly referring to “Eddie Maguire", was issued from a takeaway joint. Hey, it was lunchtime.